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Escaping The Fallacy Fork? Straw-manning and circular reasoning.

Is it time to get rid of fallacy theory?
Is there any use in having a laundry lists of labels for alleged reasoning errors, often with impressive
Latin names, that are constantly thrown around? Several people have pointed to the
“straw man fallacy” and the fallacy of “begging the question” (also known as circular reasoning or petitio principii) as counterexamples to
our Fallacy Fork, a destructive dilemma for fallacy fetishists which we developed in this paper (see also my earlier blog
post). In other words, they argue that these fallacies are (1) clear-cut and
easy to define (2) regularly occur in real life, not just in logic textbooks. If this is true, then these fallacies escape the Fallacy Fork. As we didn’t discuss circular reasoning in our paper, and the straw man fallacy
only very briefly, I’d like to address them here.

Reasonable examples of circular reasoning certainly
exist. They are often characterized as instantiating "virtuous
circularity", as opposed to "vicious circularity". For instance,
dictionaries inevitably give somewhat circular definitions of words, linking
different entries to each other in circular chains. There's no rock solid
"foundation" for the definition of words in a language.

Now dictionaries, of course, are not really in the
business of offering arguments. But in epistemology, virtuous circularity also
occurs. For example, there's no non-circular foundation to ground our
confidence in our own reasoning capacities. Whatever you're doing, you're
already tacitly relying on your reasoning capacities. Well, you have to start
somewhere, don’t you? Same with the infamous problem of induction. In order to
justify the principle of induction, you will covertly rely on inductive
reasoning. Try it. But still, we rely on our cognitive capacities and on
induction all of the time. Is this an example of vicious circularity? People
like Alvin Plantinga and Stephen Stich think so, but in an earlier paper
with Helen De Cruz and others, we argue that it isn't. (See the section on
"Biting the bullet")

As with many other fallacies, the problem with the definition
of “circular reasoning” is that it is modelled on deductive reasoning, which
provides a very crude and truncated conception of real-life reasoning (Hugo
Mercier and Dan Sperber have a very nice and provocative chapter about this in
their brilliant new book The
Enigma of Reason). In a deductive model of justification, each step is
either completely justified or not justified at all. Take the following triplet
of propositions ‘If P then Q’, ‘If Q then R’, ‘If R then P’. In a deductive
model, this is clearly circular. If these are the only premises you start with,
neither P, Q nor R can be proven, at least deductively.

But the circle need not be completely closed. It is possible to start out with a very weak and
provisional acceptance of P, and then to gradually raise you confidence through
the other propositions (Q and R), thus bootstrapping your way out of the
circularity. Here’s how philosopher F. John Clendinnen uses such virtuous circularity to Hume’s
problem of induction: “induction itself, once accepted as a minimal
principle, may be used to interpret the available evidence for or against the
thesis that the world is the kind of place in which induction is likely to
succeed” (Clendinnen 1989, full reference in our paper)

So what about the "straw man" fallacy? It’s obvious that
straw-manning occurs in real life, but notice that straw man fallacy is not
really a reasoning fallacy, but rather a violation of dialectical rules in a
discussion. If you attack a straw man, you attack a position that was not being
asserted by anyone, so even though your argument may be sound, it is
irrelevant to the discussion at hand. And if you’re attributing that position
to your interlocutor, you’re not making an error of reasoning, you’re just making
a false claim.

Even so, you can apply a version of the Fallacy
Fork here as well. A straw man fallacy cannot be distinguished on formal
grounds, and the label itself, though certainly useful in a debate, provides little help in
diagnosing them. It’s always disputable whether or not someone was really setting
up a straw man, and false charges of straw-manning abound in real-life
discussions (as I’m sure you will have noticed). There is no way to resolve the
issue except by going back and looking at what exactly has been said. The label itself does not provide a diagnostic short-cut. Moreover,
there are argumentation theorists who have convincingly argued that some
"straw men" (depending on how you define the term) are acceptable moves
in a debate, to resolve an ambiguity or sharpen a contentious point. There
is an interesting paper on this by Aikin &
Casey, which we summarized as follows:

"With
regard to the ‘‘straw man’’ fallacy, Aikin and Casey have concluded that many
forms of straw man reasoning may be acceptable moves to focus or redirect a
discussion. Diagnosing the fallacy on formal grounds is impossible, because
‘‘there are formally similar maneuvers in dialogue that contribute positively
to rational resolution of a dispute’’ (Aikin and Casey 2011: 104). If the move
is fallacious at all, it is because of the dialectical and pragmatic context of
the discussion. Lewinski (2011) reconstructs straw men reasoning as a harsh but
reasonable strategy in informal and/or adversarial debates"

By the way, false accusations of straw-manning are often
deemed "fallacious" in their own right. If you make a claim in a
debate, and then cry “straw man” when you’re being challenged on that very
claim, you’re "moving the goalposts", or engaging in "plausible
deniability". There's another name for this dialogical fallacy of denying
(taking back) what you have previously asserted, but I forgot the label. Frankly,
I don’t really care. As you can see, at some point you're just throwing around
labels, which is exactly our point of our paper.